This issue of the Annales is centered on a series of articles that explore cartography and its uses at different historical moments. At its heart are two essays on maps and mapmaking at key junctures in European expansion, demonstrating that the process of mapping the world is always both political and epistemological. The first considers different depictions of the Caspian Sea by cartographers based in Venice and Goa during the sixteenth century; the second looks at the maps made by the Vietnamese in the late nineteenth century, just as France occupied Tonkin. The dossier is completed by a review article on the diffusion and exhibition of medieval maps.

The two varia articles that follow each address, in their own way, the question of temporalities: an article on the relations between liturgical time and political conflict in the late medieval Netherlands is followed by another on the role of debt in the construction of new social stratifications in the early twentieth-century United States.

The issue concludes with a selection of book reviews on the theme of “Knowledge and Technology.”